


Lighthouse

by Bengest15



Series: Probing Faults' Faculty [2]
Category: Naruto
Genre: AU, Amnesia, Car Accident, Family Issues, Multi, Slash, the way our minds took things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-21
Updated: 2016-11-21
Packaged: 2018-09-01 07:12:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8614579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bengest15/pseuds/Bengest15
Summary: It may have come from their keen, caring mother, but their father surely hid things away for good. Maybe it’s a combination, maybe it’s not sensitivity. Anxiety is a big word… how Sasuke would like to try to run from all of this, still something told him not to.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I tried my best to keep all of them canonically in character. I hope you’ll like this AU.

It’s here finally. The destination of a journey he never imagined should be his.

“So, here we are!” the yellow haired young lad begins, again, pulling Sasuke out of reverie as he stands awkwardly in his way. Eyes roaming his surrounding, both hands holding his hips, a nostalgic look carved his handsome, complacent face.

But as much as Sasuke longed to see how his lost brother had lived, he held himself from asking this man to move away as he unintentionally caught every single time Naruto stuttered his words while he led their path, all the way from the Rain village entrance gate to the front of this tall raft house, which doors are opened behind them.

“It’s been awhile… I haven’t visited this place since they’re gone,” how hard it must feel for him to wake all the memories about his brother, Sasuke can’t imagine. “There were lots of lunch parties here—ahem,” he rubbed the tip of his nose, his face and body language implied restlessness, his eyes wandered everywhere except the house and the man in front of him.

“You know, umm… your brother was a very decent man, a little strict toward his son, but he loved the brat more than he deserves,” Naruto glanced him sideway, his lopsided grin and a fit of his gentle chuckles burnt Sasuke’s throat.

“He had a son?”

“Err, no, he was not biologically related to them, of course, but they kind of adopted him, you know.”

A puff of breathe coming out Naruto’s mouth, he lifts his arms and opened his mouth but comes none. He stumbles over a rock by the side of the raft house door, and slipped his hands inside his jeans pockets.

“So, uh… come on in!”

 

 

For most of Sasuke’s adulthood, Itachi has becoming more and more of a distant relative than an elder brother. And if it’s not because of his wife’s plea— _“Go, tell him goodbye,” Sakura looked worrisome after she released her vice-like hug, but her immediately folded arms under her breasts indicate reassurance. “Let him go.”_ —he’d rather not be here.

All of a sudden Sasuke feels scared. Hesitation gets him first, but the idea of seeing a face he recognized without all the familiarity is the only thing nauseated him. His right hand shakes and he hides it behind his coat—Itachi’s coat, to be honest—before Naruto could turn his head again.

The lad is sensitive, he noticed.

It’s as if he knew how hard it must be for him to be standing behind his seemingly older, unofficial, unrelated nephew. Oh, Sasuke knows he’s the son he’d spoken about. If there’s something he and his brother had in common, it’s certainly would be their strange inability to hear lies or unfinished half-truths as truth.

It may have come from their keen, caring mother, but their father surely hid things away for good. Maybe it’s a combination, maybe it’s not sensitivity. Anxiety is a big word… how Sasuke would like to try to run from all of this, still something told him not to.

He may throw up if he kept trying.

It’s almost ironic that Naruto should choose Itachi’s private office as the first room for them to roam about. Placed to the left from the entry way. It is almost cruel, the room reminds himself how he was reprimanded by good-ol’ Dad— _God bless him_ —for sneaking around Itachi’s bedroom… ruining the scratchy brownish papers Itachi should read and study from. It was when all Sasuke could think of is how to get his brother start playing with him. He was bored with hide and seeks; he was bored watching him practicing, studying, read… he just wants to talk and be funny with him, forgetting all the things people has tried to shape him into becoming another Itachi in the family.

Dignified, Sasuke skimmed the room. A wooden framed photograph on Itachi’s desk catches his attention.

He moves around the table and looks closer, meeting with scenery where two figures overlapped each other, laughing in front a traditional Japanese snack shop. They faced each other, Itachi’s smile looks awkward, frozen even, but the way the contrasting figure of a blue taller man tangled his arms around his brother in it is almost endearing.

“Who is he?”

It’s his turn to turn to Naruto, finding him covering a side of his mouth, lighting a black cigarette against hard blowing wind through the opened windows. It is exactly the way Itachi would burn his cigarette behind the fences of a certain other Uchiha’s home, when Sasuke itched off the desire to tell his father the degrading hobby of his firstborn; perhaps, a strange, destructive attempt to let go of his brother’s shadows over him.

As the thought of how everything should be returns, referring him back to the childhood he adored, longed, missed, hated, he shook everything almost in milliseconds when he took in better glimpses of Naruto’s perplexing absurd resemblance of Itachi.

“Oh, he’s…” the cigarette doesn’t light up, courtesy of his interruption, “your in-law… Hoshigaki Kisame, umm, he’s the one who found us, saved us.”

“So, you were also in the accident?”

“My father—an official foster father—was drunk. Stepmom left us, blah, blah… he drove fast, almost killed your brother. I guess he ran away, your brother and I were trapped under the same car. It’s almost feel like fate, to think about it.”

 _Not so sensitive, then_ , Sasuke almost laughed, _but maybe neurotic?_

Why is it so easy for him to give truth, these kinds of truth over any other kind of truth?

 

 

Finally, they entered a new room… settling right at the corner of the long corridor; a bit minimalistic, the room’s sparse but for a TV, DVD player, sofas, the usual kind but it sure gives Sasuke a new air he currently needed.

The walls are black and red before he realized _everything_ in the room had the color black and red.

Is it the living room?

“Meh, not much is living in here anymore.”

They both chuckled, Sasuke a bit rigid in his laugh, Naruto choked.

“Mind you, this was a very crowded room. There was a whole gang of us… and the lunch parties!”

“You guys eat at the living room?”

“No, no. we ate everywhere except the bathroom… but hey, who knows really? We were bunch of crazy people.”

Mere thoughts of their intimacy strike a nerve in Sasuke indeed. He shared meals with his family, but Itachi was always in a hurry.

“Please, have a sit.”

His mind wander ever further as he moved to a reclining sofa.

“Your brother used to lie there all the time…” the telling halted Sasuke midair, he practically glared at Naruto before deciding to just settle on the sofa. It’s a surprisingly squishy sofa, and it smells like perfume.

“Sometimes Kisame would cover him; put his head on his stomach. And Itachi would reach him, cuddled off to dreams I guess… they shared chemistry, a bond too strong I felt envious without knowing why.”

After fully facing Naruto again, Sasuke looked down.

“Itachi was great. The typical man-next-door, always smiling…” Naruto continues as he followed Sasuke’s eyes, looking lines of lines on the wooden floor. “Mysterious, he kept every unpleasant thoughts and he’ll worry us all.”

Sasuke didn’t expect that.

What in world is this person trying to tell him?

_What in world am I trying to tell him?_

And for each second, silence got thicker.

“Don’t…” Naruto started again, “I don’t want to make you feel… _a lot_ more confused, but…”

The man shivers. It may have been the wind, but the look upon his eyes, the moving eyeballs, darkened eye sockets, tight jaw, excessive ragged breathes, drying lips.

Naruto looked very attractive and vulnerable at the same time.

“…right now I kind of… well, there’s just no one to turn to now…” at the very moment he closed his mouth, sewing a silvery chain of smokes from his nose, Sasuke felt Naruto sees him—this person managed to see the lightened dark eyes, the jagged pieces of lesser painful truth cutting through every weaves of fate that has brought them to this.

They’ve seen many things just to find themselves strangled in a tiny path one moment too many. A reflection might not be what they needed. It’s the loneliness, fastening dreams, guilt over regrets… all this coming from a gentle sporadic clarity of mortals’ existence.

And perhaps it’s not so wrong for Naruto to catch the falling Sasuke, to fall atop him too, kissing his lips and combs through dark strands, catching the Hidden Leaf’ headband on Sasuke’s neck from falling he has simply leave it hanging.

The wide, pale chest of a slightly muscular man under him glistens through the darkening hour. Orange sky reddening slightly above them impaled Naruto’s hidden memories of his first meeting with Uchiha Itachi.

The blood covered the rhetoric, cunning beauty of a silent stranger on the verge of death. Lying motionless, dragged out by long, blue arms before them. He’d give everything to bring the other memory, of one long-haired man with warm smiles greeting him home, back here, right under him.

But reality is stubborn. Nothing happen.

The wobbly knees only allow him so much that he takes two steps back, landing on a chair, silently watching as Sasuke leans away as the back of his thighs touches the surface of Itachi’s rarely used desk.

They both feels naked, gazing on what the other now knew, reflected it on their stare for each to pry.

Sun sets solemnly, mournful.

**Author's Note:**

> oh please… please don’t be mad at me.


End file.
